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Huge new satellite outshines nearly every star in the sky
(www.nature.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Depressing actually. Future generations will look up and see shitty satellites.
That seems more than a tad hyperbolic. My wife and I enjoy sitting in our backyard next to the fire and stargazing every now and again. We'll catch maybe a dozen satellites on a good night, during the couple hours post-sunset when you can actually catch the sunlight glinting off them. By about 2 hours after sunset, the number of objects that are both high enough to still reflect sunlight and large enough to see is pretty tiny.
I see vastly more planes with blinking lights and bright landing lights than I do satellites, and this has been the case for decades, but somehow that's not a threat to our enjoyment of the night sky?
Every light adds to light pollution though and makes it more difficult for earth-based astronomy. And that's excluding events where satilites pass through observations.
Extremely annoying, but inevitable I guess.
Hopefully they will have de-orbited by then and we would have found a better solution. But then we may not have too many generations left anyway.
I'm surprised if most of humanity makes it through the coming 20 years.
I think we have seen our best decades already.
The good news is that people have been saying this for decades.
Further back than that. Centuries if not millenia. It just was a different flavor of apocalypse back then.
Yeah I once read a book describing the soon coming end of the world from every century going beck to PraiseGod Barebones the English politician who prophesised the coming end of the world in 1675, they all said the same thing 'mankinds huberis and sudden turn to immorality has doomed us all'
The bad news is that it doesn't say much about current events.